Trump’s interview with Associated Press (AP) reporter Jackie Pace would be laughable if it were not for the fact that he is the President of the United States.
Leadership partly requires the ability to convey ideas, concepts, policy, and details. The President of a country must have the ability to comprehensively explain foreign policy issues. President Donald Trump does not possess any of these.
In the interview, Trump lacks details. His responses are wordy with an overuse, as usual, of superlatives. He uses “So many words, so little sense.”
Even the kids on Steve Harvey’s Little Big Shots respond more appropriately and comprehensively than Donald Trump.
Under Trump, there clearly must be a question of the legitimacy of United States leadership and its institutions.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
AP: Can I ask you, over your first 100 days — you're not quite there yet — how do you feel like the office has changed you?
TRUMP: Well the one thing I would say — and I say this to people — I never realized how big it was. Everything's so (unintelligible) like, you know the orders are so massive. I was talking to —
AP: You mean the responsibility of it, or do you mean —
TRUMP: Number One, there's great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I'm saying to myself, "You know, this is more than just like, 79 (sic) missiles. This is death that's involved," because people could have been killed. This is risk that's involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area — you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away — and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet .... every decision is much harder than you'd normally make. (unintelligible) ... This is involving death and life and so many things. ... So it's far more responsibility. (unintelligible) ....The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world. The second-largest company in the world is the Defense Department. The third-largest company in the world is Social Security. The fourth-largest — you know, you go down the list.
AP: Right.
TRUMP. It's massive. And every agency is, like, bigger than any company. So you know, I really just see the bigness of it all, but also the responsibility. And the human responsibility. You know, the human life that's involved in some of the decisions.
“I would not inflict this on you except that I think it important you read it -- the full transcript of Trump's Friday interview with the White House correspondent for the Associated Press.
“It shows that we are dealing with someone who is becoming seriously unhinged -- not just a pathological narcissist but a borderline sociopath who will almost certainly self destruct.
“The question I keep asking myself is whether he'll self destruct in a relatively harmless way, or will take down many others with him.” －Robert Reich
By Alana Horowitz Satlin
